


turning saints into the sea

by lapoesieestdanslarue



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Blood and Injury, Hurt/Comfort, Light Angst, M/M, it's legitimatley two am i hate these assholes and what they do to me, this was meant to be about steve struggling but it just became fluffy instead ?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-06
Updated: 2018-05-06
Packaged: 2019-05-02 20:08:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,796
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14552565
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lapoesieestdanslarue/pseuds/lapoesieestdanslarue
Summary: "Sorry about the blood in your mouth,” Steve says, tongue fumbling over the words, having conjured them from his memory but not remembering where from. "I wish it were mine"





	turning saints into the sea

**Author's Note:**

  * For [apolliades](https://archiveofourown.org/users/apolliades/gifts).



i.

The apartment is silent when Steve finally makes his way inside. The door knob slides against his grip, slick with blood, and Steve stumbles when he finally pushes his way inside. He takes one step, two. 

Braces himself against the counter. One breath, two. 

The lights aren’t on, so he’s mostly in the dark, but the city still burns bright enough that even at three o’clock in the morning he can make out the outline of the figure crouching on the fire escape by the window. 

“You gonna come inside tonight, Buck?” 

“You were supposed to be back yesterday,” Bucky says instead.

Steve sighs. Rests his head against the cool marble of the counter. “Mission went south halfway through. Got held up.”

“Go to sleep, Stevie.” His voice turns so soft when he says things like that, even now, so many years on. _‘It’s those baby blues of yours, Stevie,’_ he used to say. _‘Turn them on me and bam. I’m ice cream on a hot day, done for. Too soft, Stevie. You make me too damn soft.’_

“Will you still be here in the morning?” It’s a stupid question to ask. He knows well by now not to expect any answer. Bucky stays silent, and it crushes Steve all the same.

 

ii.

When Steve wakes, the clock by his bedside tells him it’s four in the pm and the sky is descending into a hazy orange.

His pillow is all bloody from the night, and when he pushes himself up to walk the kitchen, his stomach roils at the bright crimson handprint he leaves in its place. The metallic taste of his own blood permeates his mouth, cloying. He washes it out with coffee, and even though he still hasn’t worked out how to use the machine quite yet and it doesn’t taste like how it’s supposed to, it does enough of a trick to distract him. He doesn’t focus too much on the doorknob, the bright brass, miraculously cleansed of the blood he’d spilt last night.

When he’s finished with his cup, he makes another one. Black, one sugar. That’s how Bucky used to like it. 

He leaves it out on the fire escape, and goes back inside. 

 

iii.

Steve feels sick just looking at the sheets, the tangled, red mess they’ve become. 

He strips the sheets off, gathers them into his arms and gets out a bucket of cold water. The water turns red from the stains of his actions, the soap gets worn down to a slip and his hands begin to crack the scrubbing. 

God probably didn’t mean for any of this to happen, he reckons. His enhanced hands dwarf the soap, the scrub. His enhanced hands, bloody and raw, that punched the life out of men not twenty four hours ago. Hands that held bodied down as the last sliver of life was beat out of him. Bad bodies, admittedly, nazi sons of bitches, but bodies all the same. Bullies aren’t what they used to be. God probably didn’t mean for any of this to have happened. 

His sheets are white, beneath his gory, stained fingers, and nothing is sacred anymore.

 

iv.

 

The coffee mug is empty by the time he gets back.

They know each other; ghosts always do.

 

v.

 

“You want dinner, Buck?”

“You cleaned your sheets.”

Steve’s come to expect this, this tactic of answering a question with a statement. He makes a portion for Bucky anyways, but puts it in a tupperware so he can eat it wherever it is he’s staying.

“Yeah, didn’t you see them?”

Bucky is silent. Steve frowns down at the pasta, the single red drop that’s appeared and is blooming red. He goes to grab a fork, and sees his fingers still smeared with blood. 

“Shit,” he curses.

 

vi.

 

It’s a thing now, this thing they’re doing. Bucky on the outside, skulking around, Steve on the inside. It reminds him of their youth, the apartment they’d had, and that damn yowling street cat that kicked up unholy hell when it came to dinner time.

It was Bucky’s fault; he always goddamn fed the mangey thing. Cooing sweet little nothings at her, calling her babydoll as he dished her up portions of his own plate.

“She’s just going to keep coming back, you know,” Steve told him one night, scratching behind her bitten ears. “Hell, why not give her your bed and call her the queen of Sheba?”

“Aw, Stevie, don’t go getting jealous,” Bucky’d shot back, smarmy. He knocked his bare ankle against Steve’s. “‘Sides, you know I have a thing for strays.”

Now, it’s like that again, except Steve’s never been much good at comfort, not the way Bucky ever was. Too awkward in his own skin, at first too small for him, now too big. Steve’s aware Bucky’s no alleycat, but he’s not got much else as a point of contact, so he supposes he’ll have to make do.

He sighs. The clock on his nightstand blinks the time two minutes past three in the morning.

The problem is, Steve thinks, is that there's not one weak link. There are two fucking weak links. Two boys with fucked up stories and fucked up ways of ending up where they are. The problem is, Steve thinks, where do you draw the line?

 

vii.

 

“You washed your sheets again.”

Steve sighs over the sounds of the smoothie maker. “Yeah. Must’ve had another nosebleed.”

“Do you lie to yourself to make it easier?”

“Only about the things that don’t matter much,” he admits. He looks up to Bucky, meets his eyes- those same eyes- and doesn’t back down. “I’m not under much illusion that I’m a good person.”

 

viii.

“This isn’t your battle to fight,” Bucky tells him fiercely one night, before he’s about to head out to Serbia for one of the last known Hydra bases. “Listen to me, Steve. Hydra, Shield, whoever the fuck- it’s not your problem anymore. This isn’t yours now.”

Steve stays silent, tries to take a steady breath, picks at the crusted blood beneath his nails.  
“Christ,” Bucky swears. “Can’t you just keep your thick skull out of it for two seconds?”

“I don’t think I’m able for much else, anymore, Buck.” The confession weighs heavy in the dark. “I don’t think there’s much left to me, now. Just a shield, and some fists. Bloody fists. Always with the blood, everywhere.”

Bloody hands, Steve thinks wildly, bloody hands, bloody lips, bloody boys. 

 

ix.

“Steve?”

Steve smiles into the wild night. He tastes blood dripping from his teeth, a grisly smile. Terrifying, maybe. He could shock the world. He could shock. Given the chance. 

His fists, loose by his sides, bleed steadily. Blackened cuts over his knuckles, torn edges of skin surrounding the red blood bubbling up. Blood starts out blue, hits oxygen, turns red. Steve thinks it will be the opposite for him, at the end. He started out red, on fire, and slowly the oxygen gets cut off. He'll be blue again soon. But that's too comforting a thought. He wipes his bloody knuckles on his trousers. There's no stain. There's never a stain. His bloody teeth are dripping onto his shirt. There's no stain. 

 

There’s hands on his abdomen, holding him steady as he falls forward. A bitten-out curse word, and it’s in Bucky’s voice. Softer, then “Stevie, you’re okay. C’mon, we go to bed. Get you all rested up.”

“Buck?”

“Yeah, buddy.”

"Sorry about the blood in your mouth,” Steve says, tongue fumbling over the words, having conjured them from his memory but not remembering where from. "I wish it were mine"

 

x.

 

_“Scrawny little fucker, aren’t you?” The boy sneers, before pulling another punch, landing squarely on Steve’s jaw, sending him flying backwards into the red brick wall, his head knocking against the cement._

_“I can do this all day,” He spits, the words flying from his mouth hard and red hot, along with the blood the boy had drawn from his mouth, hitting the pavement fast as the punches they pulled. His sneer wasn’t as impressive as the other boy’s was, but he had managed to keep all his teeth this time, and he was counting that as a victory in itself._

He readies himself, and goes for a swing, hurling his entire body into it--

\--A hand, desperately clutching at rumpled bed sheets--

_He stumbles, shuts his eyes as he begins to fall but instead of hitting the cool brick pavement his fall is broken by something softer and prickly and- grass. He’s fallen onto a field. When Steve looks up, he’s no longer in a back alley in Brooklyn. In front of him stretches miles and miles of trenches and tents, the old battleground they would spend their nights at. In the distance, the forest is smoking, embers slowly drifting up into the ether. But the flames are growing and growing, become brighter and more violent with each passing moment--_

\--A sweat-drenched chest heaving a shaky, halted breath. Not this, not again-

“ _Bucky” He breathes as they lock eyes. Buck, his Bucky, right in front of him, just a few feet away, looking exactly the same as he did when they last saw each other. Beautiful and young and_ close. _He stumbles up and staggers towards him, but with each step he takes, Bucky’s face contorts. His cheekbones become hallow, his skin pale and the bags under his eyes deepen like bruises. Behind them, the flames grow and grow, devouring the earth like it means nothing._

“ _Who did this to you, Buck?” He asks frantically. “What happened?” He goes forward, hand outstretched, but Bucky steps out of his reach, his features twisting into a bitter glare. “Please tell me, doll, and I’ll make them pay.”_

He knows the answer, knows what he’s going to say, please don’t say it-

“ _You did,” Bucky answers, but it’s not his voice, it’s something much worse. Something darker, broken. “How could you? Look what you’ve done to me.”_

_The raging fire is creeping closer with every passing second, and Hydra forces come with it, mercilessly destroying everything in their wake. “Buck, just come with me-”_

“ _I’m not going anywhere with you,” He spits. “I’m not going anywhere with a_ murderer.”

“ _Bucky I’m sorry,” He implores, nearly a plea. “I’m so, so sorry, you’ll never know how sorry--.”_

_He shakes his head, face crumpled as tears fall from his eyes. “You’re not sorry. You can’t be sorry, because you let me fall.”_

_Steve goes to reach for him again, distraught. He finds purchase on Bucky’s uniform but his hands, as usual, are covered in blood, and only serve to stain Bucky further. “No, Bucky, I didn’t mean to. I didn’t mean to let you fall, Bucky, please-”_

_His words get swallowed up beneath an earth shattering explosion, flinging him back as the shock waves come to greet him, harsh and unforgiving and--_

And a cold hand on his chest, metal. A voice in his ear, a forehead on his. The words “It’s okay, Stevie. I’m here, now. I’m here.”

 

xi.

Bucky stays, for the first time, but Steve is still too afraid to touch him. He doesn’t want to get blood on him as well.

 

xii.

“Be safe,” Bucky tells him, as Steve prepares to leave. Natasha dug up some old files on Kemper, the red right hand of Pierce, and had coordinates for a potential hideout. “Come home. I’ll be waitin’.”

And yeah, he will be, is the thing. It’s new, they’ve not said much on it. Steve doesn’t want to spook Bucky, and Bucky-- Bucky looks at him with this deep sadness in his eyes, something akin to pity, but too embedded with love to cut Steve deep.

Sometimes it scares him. The ferocity of his love for Bucky, the things he’d do for him. The heavy knowledge that he’d do it, and more again, and wouldn’t even stop to think about it.

 

xiii.

“Steve, baby, there’s no blood.”

But there _is_ , is the problem. There is, and he’s drenched in, from head to toe. He can smell it from himself, the rotten bitterness to it. He can feel it cool and harden on his skin, over the ridges of his knuckles, locking them, encasing them, trapping him in the violence he creates. 

“Oh god,” he gasps. “I never meant for this to be--” 

“Steve,” Bucky’s voice is low in his ear. “There’s nothing there. They’re clean, see?” Their hands are intertwined, Steve’s blood stained and crimson, Bucky’s clean, not marred at all. “Look, I’ll wash it off, if you want. I’ll make them clean again.”

He doesn’t know if that’s possible, in truth. Blood in so deeply ingrained in Steve, spilling both his own and others in equal measures until kingdom come. There’s no repenting for that. He’s in blood, stepped in it, drowning in it, he doesn’t know if he’ll ever be able to make it out alive.

God never meant for this to happen. Nothing is sacred anymore.

But still, Bucky persists. Runs the hot water until it’s up to temperature, gets the soap and a washcloth. Takes Steve’s hand in his and washes the blood off, all off, in slow swipes with the cloth. Over his torn open knuckles, the ridges between his fingers, underneath his nails. 

“It’s gone now, sweetheart,” Bucky whispers, pressing a kiss against his temple. 

And it is. For the first time, it really is.

Steve closes his eyes and lets out a ragged breath, his head falling against Bucky’s shoulder. 

xiv.

In mid-april of 1941, the 107th had been tasked with searching out and destroying the land mines amist what had been German territory, hidden and riddles within the labyrinth of tunnels they’d dug.

More often than not they were asked to explore the tunnels before they blew them up. This memory is coming back to him so vividly because they all detested it, and used to draw numbers out of Morita’s helmet. Six slips of paper for the six men, and whoever got the number six had to strip off his gear and crawl in headfirst with a flashlight and a kit, and whatever prayers he had in his back pocket. Steve traces, absentmindedly, over the metal plates of Bucky’s hand, gazing at his sleeping form beside him.

 

The messy hair, the weeks-old stubble, all bringing him back to those caves, the musty smell that filled his nose and wouldn’t leave for days on end, the feel of the mud sliding against his shirt and getting all over him. 

It’s the absolute fear, terror like he’s never know, a child in the darkness waiting for the monster under the bed to snap it’s jaws and eat them whole. The panic that lodged in his throat as the flashlight in his hand flickered dangerously, the way his nerves would paralyse him as he opened his mouth to scream for help. The way the words would die on his lips as he realised he was already in so deep, no one would hear. The way he’d have to grit his teeth and blink away the tears in his eyes and keep going. Swallow down his fear like a shot of whisky because he was Captain America now, and Captain America had to be brave, always. 

Thinking of it all now, and unbidden, Bucky comes to mind. The claustrophobic pressure of want, the intensity of them, the two of them, alive and breathing under the dense, crushing love they’d made for themselves.

Love that endured trenches and gulfs, miles and years between them, ice and falls. 

Underneath his finger, Bucky’s metal hand is cold to touch. His metal hand, Steve’s clean one. The same metal hand that used to be a symbol of Hydra’s power, but had washed Steve clean of all of that sticky blood on him. 

The shield is still by the bed, the uniform in his closet, and when he needs to, he’ll put it on, bear the heavy mantle of Captain America for as long as needs be. 

“And when you come home,” Bucky’d mumbled into his hair earlier that night. “I’ll be here, to clean away any of that bad, baby.”

In the now, in the two o’clock night light, Bucky cracks an eye open. “Agus ní bheidh a fhios ag an fhuil ar do lámha aon bhaile,” he mutters, lazy with sleep.

Steve’s heart goes triple time. “You remember that?”

“I remember all of it. I come home to you and I remember it all.” Bucky is silent of a minute, fingers dancing against Steve’s. “‘Cept for the end of that damn line.”

“Toisc go bhfuil mo shaol grá agat,” Steve replies. 

“Yeah,” Bucky smiles. “That was it.”

**Author's Note:**

> Agus ní bheidh a fhios ag an fhuil ar do lámha aon bhaile = And the blood on your hands will not know any home  
> Toisc go bhfuil mo shaol grá agat = because in me your love lives


End file.
